Their "Exquisite Works": Rewriting the Art History of Cuba

This Tuesday Seminar will summarize some of the research that sustained the art exhibit El Pasado Mío / My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art (Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, September 2022-June 2023) and is based on a book in progress coauthored with Cary A. García Yero. By centering the artistic production and the social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, the exhibition and the book suggest new approaches, questions, chronologies, and sources to the history of the visual arts in Cuba and Latin America.

Speaker

Alejandro de la Fuente, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute

Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

About the Speaker

Alejandro de la Fuente is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente’s works on race, slavery, law, art, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020, coauthored with Ariela J. Gross), Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). He is the coeditor, with George Reid Andrews, of Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2018, available in Spanish and Portuguese) and of the “Afro-Latin America” book series, Cambridge University Press. He is also the coeditor (with David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) of The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art (2023).

Professor de la Fuente is also the curator of several art exhibits dealing with issues of race and the author or editor of their corresponding volumes: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (2010-12); Drapetomania: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba (2013-16); Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present (2017-2024), and El Pasado Mío / My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art (ongoing).

About the Moderator

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.